


The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms!

by alchemise



Category: Black Panther (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Halloween, Pranks and Practical Jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-09 22:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16458401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemise/pseuds/alchemise
Summary: "What was more entertaining than making her brother shriek in fright at the perfect scary prank?"





	The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GlassesOfJustice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassesOfJustice/gifts).



Long before he was king—even before he wore the mantle of the Black Panther, with all the powers that conveyed—T'Challa had still been nearly impossible to scare.

Shuri had tried, of course. As any younger sibling must try to prank their elder. From the time she was a small child, she would build things. Gadgets, robots, computerized devices of all manner. All with vibranium running through their core. As she grew older and the extent of her intellect and abilities with technology became clear, the things she built took on new sophistication and ingenuity. By the time she was a teenager, Shuri was inventing things no one had ever created before: new ways to automate, ease labor, help people, and, naturally, new ways to entertain and have fun. And what was more entertaining than making her brother shriek in fright at the perfect scary prank?

Halloween wasn't a widely celebrated holiday in Wakanda. The country's lasting independence and seclusion had instead preserved its own traditions of days to honor the ancestors or to break with social rules and commit mischief. Shuri preferred the latter. So much so that as a child, she'd insisted on celebrating both the Wakandan holidays and Halloween. The more opportunities she had to trick her brother, the better.

Shuri loved to use Hollywood horror films as inspiration for her pranks, sneaking away to watch them even when her parents insisted she was too young. Eventually they realized it was better to just watch them with her as a family, mocking the bad effects during the scary bits. Hollywood magic couldn't touch Wakandan technology for realistic illusions.

The Halloween before her father's death, Shuri and he had watched the first few _Friday the 13th_ films together. She thought it would be brilliant to incorporate a creepy hockey mask into a prank someday but hadn't yet figured out a foolproof way to have it scare her brother.

When she was twelve, after watching a slew of giant irradiated insect movies from the 1950s, she'd built a huge animatronic spider that moved so convincingly it was easier to believe that a four foot long spider existed than that a robot could seem so alive. She'd programmed it to learn T'Challa's daily routines so that it could choose the opportune moment to jump out at him. It picked a perfectly secluded corridor, coming out of a bit of shadow at an angle where one was only likely to notice it in their peripheral vision. An optimal location for a good scare. Unfortunately, the spider had chosen its attack while T'Challa was walking with their mother. The Queen was briefly startled, and, like a good son, T'Challa had responded with immediacy, smashing the spider into the ground before he even got a good look at it. Shuri was grounded for a week but mostly lamented the waste of a beautifully assembled prank.

The Halloween after T'Challa became King, Shuri was determined that this would be the year she'd finally get him. She figured after everything they had been through that he deserved a more innocent kind of fright, one that would be followed with laughter, not tears. She'd been watching a strange mix of mediocre movies about ghosts and creatures from the bottom of the sea, and she had a plan.

She started by easily hacking her brother's kimoyo beads. Which barely even counted as hacking, considering she'd written all their basic programming to begin with. She had the beads malfunction throughout T'Challa's day, in increasingly annoying ways. Communications dropped out partway through, asking for information resulted in unexpected tangents (a query into global currency prices returned the history of the material composition of money), attempting to control the temperature of a room switched it randomly between Fahrenheit and Celsius. To top it off, she had the beads send barely audible whispers, as though someone were trying to talk but couldn't connect fully. On any normal day, such annoyances might be the end goal of Shuri messing with her brother. But this was not a normal day. It was Halloween, and Shuri was just getting started.

The malfunctioning beads brought T'Challa, as desired, to Shuri's lab looking for help. As he descended the stairs, Shuri had the room darken subtly. Vibranium nanobots running down the sides of the stairwell moved and shimmered as T'Challa walked, in ways that suggested the staircase was growing and continuing deeper and deeper into the mountain than it had any right to. She had the speakers play similar whispering to what his beads had done earlier, just loud enough so that the very edge of his consciousness would detect the words "down down down," as he walked further. He continued, clearly wary but, she hoped, still assuming some electrical malfunction was affecting both his beads and the lab. She didn't want to raise his suspicions too early.

Once he reached the bottom, phase two set in, and the nanobots immediately absorbed all sound in the room, muffling all vibrations so that T'Challa would be unable to hear his own footsteps or even his own breath. Just enough to disorient him and throw off his enhanced senses. He stopped moving and looked around, tensely appraising the situation.

Words appeared on the glass walls of the room—the nanobots designed to mimic a ghostly haze: _COME CLOSER_. As he approached the window, the words changed to _LOOK DOWN_.

T'Challed peered through the glass, squinting into the darkness of the vibranium mine. Now for her grand finale.

The sound-dampening nanobots turned off, as a great beast burst up through the depths of the mine, made of shadow and the unearthly blue fire of vibranium. With a hellish roar, it launched itself toward the window of the lab, tendrils stretching around the glass to enclose the lab on all sides, while endless and impossibly sharp teeth emerged from a mouth that seemed to occupy the entire body of the creature, promising a horrific end for anyone it managed to get a hold of.

Shuri was hidden in the lab, poised waiting for T'Challa's reaction, and he did not disappoint.

T'Challa's scream was so loud and soul-rending, it seemed that the entire mine echoed with it. Shuri suddenly feared she had gone too far and had instead added one more moment of pain to her brother's life rather than the funny scare she'd intended.

Without even stopping to disable her hologram beast, she ran to him in concern. "My brother, I am sorry! I did not mean for…"

She stopped short, coming to a halt in the midst of all her sound and light effects. In the middle of all the chaos she'd expertly arranged, her brother was laughing.

Shuri knew she'd been played. "I didn't actually scare you, did I?"

T'Challa regained some measure of composure, straightening up from the hilarity that had doubled him over. Tears were running down his face as he tried to speak. "No, my sister. You did not scare me. This was, however, your most valiant effort yet. I thought such a scream as I could possibly give was the only appropriate response."

Part of her wanted to pout in disappointment at yet another failure. But she couldn't begrudge him tricking her in return so effectively. "I'll simply have to try again next year."

T'Challa wrapped his arm around her shoulders, still chuckling. "Yes, you will. Who knows, maybe someday your pranks will succeed." He paused briefly. "Although it does not seem very likely."

Shuri scowled next to him. Next year she'd definitely find a way to include that hockey mask.


End file.
